“I’m a banker just doing God’s work.” Lloyd Blankfein. CEO Goldman Sachs Nov. 2009 quoted in The Times. Last week I had a long conversation with a very old friend of mine who is now a Director of Youth and Family Services in one of NYC’s boroughs. We hear so much about how Wall Street […]
So far so vanilla. Now lets look at how, as the ETF market has grown, the clever boys and girls of finance have found ‘innovative’ ways of pumping those ETFs up a bit, just like they did to Securities. Use of Derivatives in ‘Synthetic’ ETFs The main innovation in ETFs has been the creation of what are
Where will the next point of instability be? Not what will trigger the next liquidity and credit crunch and cause the next landslide of panic selling and losses. We can already see many candidates for the trigger. But what will be the mechanism by which it is amplified and spread? I think that in a
ETFs – The Next Accident Waiting to Happen? Read More »
Another update from Switzerland. Sometimes people forget the point of the story of King Midas. And by forgetting, they make the same mistake as Midas. How often have you heard someone say, “He has the Midas touch you know”, meaning he’s rich and knows how to get richer. Whereas the story of Midas is how once
The Midas Touch – Swiss style Read More »
There are so many reasons for believing that the European ‘recovery’ plan is not working now and will continue to not work no matter how long we are forced to subsidize it. Today we can add one more reason – Mr Francois Hollande is now the favourite to beat Mr Sarkozy and become France’s next
Growth will save us? You bet! Read More »
“We’re all in this together .” Surely one of the brass plated lies which will be seen as encapsulating the failure of our times. Much the way that “For God, King and Country” reminds us of an old order which thundered and then bled to death on the fields of Flanders nearly a century ago
We’re all in this together Read More »
A horrid thought has been incubating for the last few days. I don’t know how many of you know much about Vulture Funds, what they do and how they do it, but it forms the basis of my horrid thought. Nations issue debt. After it is bought, it often gets re-sold on what is called
Around a black hole there is what is called an event horizon. It is the point beyond which you can no longer turn back. In Hollywood films the event is often made rather dramatic with lots of shaking and sirens, as if it was like the lip of an approaching waterfall. It isn’t. In reality
The ECB swallowed the market Read More »
More questions about the stability and probity of German banking this morning following on from the rumour of the €1 Trillion hole in German banks. This from the 21st March Wall Street Journal, Deutsche Bank AG changed the legal structure of its huge U.S. subsidiary to shield it from new regulations that would have required the
More evidence of German banking worries Read More »
When the Chief Market Analyst of FX Solutions, Mr Joseph Trevisani, in an interview on CNBC on 23rd Sept 2011,was asked about fluctuating currency values, his reply created a stir. What he said was that you had to look at what was going on in Europe – everyone then expected him to mention Greece – but instead he said, “There
A rumour concerning €1 trillion in German bad debt Read More »
